>>8211501Yes, I know it sounds odd on the outset, but it really would've been harder.
Let's say they faked it, according to all the known laws of physics nothing that they did in research, preparation, the contracting, or building the vehicles is unrealistic, all of it is unequivocally proven to be both possible but also reasonable. Unlike the soviets, the US was a bit more cautious about our testing and pilot safety. With provable results from the ground tests at least.
If we really were to have faked it, should we have put more effort into safety testing than our competitors? Wouldn't it have made sense to put in the same amount of safety testing and spend far less budget than we did?
But that doesn't support what I said, but you see the point.
Now what does support it is the fact that errors occurred. Some of them people could tell would happen and some just bizarre (like in Apollo 10, the crew reported some feces that had escaped the "waste disposal" and was free to float about the cabin) It was never mentioned on the news at the time, rarely ever after, but it was recorded in the very very long flight transcript that was never meant to be reread
